A little more about my project. (Ah, I ramble on a lot here so feel free just to skip ahead & just look at the maps.)

So like I said in my intro post these maps are for a world for an LRP. Based on this, there are a number of restrictions I have to work with.

We want a fairly small world. By this I’m talking about the area the players will be able to travel to & role play in should be fairly smallish. We figure that for our purposes it’s better to have a well developed & detailed world that is comparatively small, than a large one with large sections that are unknown/undeveloped. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the world itself is small it just means that the land masses that the players will know about/are able to get to are small. This is complicated by the steam punk genre that means that sometime in the future the players may get their hands on an air ship of some kind & therefore can explore a very large area if they choose to. So I guess the second condition is that the geography has to discourage travel outside of the starting landmasses.

We feel its best wherever possible to keep things as believable as possible. In LRP there’s always a certain amount of suspension of disbelief, but the more you can reduce the need for it the more emersion is possible so that’s what we’re aiming for. To this end we are attempting to have the weather & other geological features of the world somewhat resemble the actual playing space that we will use (this playing space being various locations across Victoria). Of cause we can play around with this somewhat, adding more fanciful elements such as volcanoes or perhaps steeper mountains than what we have down here, but I can tell you from experience it’s very difficult to role-play as though your tramping through snow on a sweltering hot day, or walking through a desert while its bucketing down rain. I guess one of the biggest positives of playing in Victoria is that we do get quite a variety of weather, the negative being it’s almost impossible to predict it.

It has been decided that there are four major “cultures” in this world. This is because there are four organisers so this seemed the fairest way to split up the workload. To go into this a little more, there are two major powers within the world that will that have comparatively large landmasses. They both have a steam punk level of technology but to different degrees. The third “culture” is actually a collection of big-ish islands with quite a diverse range of cultures within it. They have a much lower level of tech but a much higher level of Magic. The final “culture” are basically pirates, they won’t have much in the way of land masses, a few smaller islands & a number of ports on all the others. Basically this “culture” completely dominates all international waters & air space, if you want to get to another country you have to go through these guys. They have the most advanced travel devices (with the possible exception of the steam train) but are slightly behind in everything else.

So after working with all this here is what I’ve got so far. I am currently working on paper, then tracing it into Inkscape. I'm really not worried about looks at this point, that will come latter. I am interested in making sure all the bits make sense & that I'm not breaking to many laws of nature.

I am interested in all feed back, just please keep in mind this is my first attempt.

Steel General

07-03-2009, 09:34 AM

Looking good so far.

Just an idea here --- you may want to consider expanding ranges of hills out from the mountains so that you get a slightly more gradual transition to the flatter terrain.

LisaJane

07-13-2009, 05:14 AM

Thanks, is this better? & a few even darker ones to represent mountain peaks.
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Alfar

07-13-2009, 05:47 AM

Looks pretty nice. Just one river violation, I reckon, the river coming into the lake from almost straight east. Where the river is met by the one coming straight north from the mountain, the main river splits momentarily to form an eye-like shape, which it's apparently not supposed to realistically.

Also, in a few places, you have rivers joining larger rivers at angles against the river flow. They'd normally join at an angle so that the water flows in the same direction from the start.

Of course, you may have a great reason for this, if so, disregard.

Steel General

07-13-2009, 07:47 AM

Thanks, is this better? & a few even darker ones to represent mountain peaks.

Yup, I think that looks much better (Not that anything was wrong with the original).

LisaJane

07-13-2009, 10:07 PM

Thanks, I should probably point out at this point that I don't have any good reasons for things not being 'natural looking' so if you see any thing that's not quite right let me know.

As for joining rivers, I've tried to fix it up a bit, is this enough or does it need to be more? (I've changed the direction of some of them just where they join with another river, not the overall direction.)
14813

Alfar

07-14-2009, 03:15 AM

That looks just fine. Yay!

LisaJane

07-20-2009, 09:13 PM

First hand copied map. What do you think? 14973

At the moment it's only got the major cities on it & just dots for the towns.